Latest news on the Asia-Pacific region from the United Nations
- Concluding a six-day official visit to the Republic of Korea (ROK), a UN-appointed independent human rights expert urged the country to help reverse the international community’s failure to address the crisis in Myanmar by taking the regional lead in ending violence against civilians there.
- Preserving the memory of people who suffered and died during the Khmer Rouge's rule in Cambodia helps to ensure such atrocities are never repeated, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in the country’s capital, Phnom Penh, on Sunday.
- At a time when geopolitical divides threaten to spark new conflicts and make older ones harder to resolve, the global economy cannot afford to be split into two opposing camps, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said at a press conference in Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, on Saturday.
- Amid a looming food security crisis linked to Sri Lanka’s cost-of-living crunch, the country’s most vulnerable breadwinners wonder how much longer they can cope, as the Government battles the nation’s worst economic crisis since independence in 1948.
- Two-thirds of Afghans are going hungry, with girls' education subject to “random edicts” of the Taliban, while crime and terrorism are thriving once more buoyed by a large spike in opium production, warned the President of the UN General Assembly on Thursday.
- Amidst Sri Lanka’s worst economic crisis since independence, the UN on Tuesday revised its joint Humanitarian Needs and Priorities (HNP) Plan, appealing for more life-saving assistance to aid 3.4 million people.
- The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) launched “an unprecedented number” of cruise and ballistic missiles over the course of just 48 hours this week, the UN Assistant Secretary-General for the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific, told the Security Council in an emergency meeting on Friday.
- Although flood waters have continued to recede in many flood-affected areas across Pakistan in recent weeks, around eight million people need essential health assistance, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday.
- The 2022 opium crop in Afghanistan is the most profitable in years with cultivation up by nearly a third amid soaring prices, and despite the multiple humanitarian and economic crises facing the country and it’s Taliban rulers, said the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) on Tuesday.
- Malaysia’s forced return of asylum-seekers to Myanmar has meant that hundreds of Myanmar nationals have been “sent back against their will” to the troubled country in the last two months, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, said on Tuesday.
- UN Secretary-General António Guterres underscored the importance of global solidarity to combat the climate emergency during his visit to Viet Nam, which concluded on Saturday.
- During his two-day visit to India this week, UN Secretary-General António Guterres visited a model project site in Gujarat state, designated the country's first solar-powered village. He commended villagers there on the shift towards renewable energy, which he said is not only changing lives in the community, but also combating climate change.
- UN Secretary-General António Guterres is in India, and he began his official visit on Wednesday by attending a tribute to the victims of the 2008 terrorist attacks that took place at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Mumbai.